What would you do different?

Greetings all! I just put a new contract on a home in Broadlands, and am very excited to share my home owner stories with you all as well.

Anyway, I just got the phonecall on where to place these smarthome outlets and all these connections. My question is, if you had it to do over, is there a place you really wish you had an outlet?

I'm buying the Faulkner model if that's important... My background is in computer networking, so I could do some of the wiring myself, but I wanted to know where the must have cable drops would be for TV, Cat5, phone, etc...

Any other tips on what you may have done WRT placement of outlets, etc, would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks!

-Scott

 

Scott,

Welcome to Broadlands!

I think it depends on how many multimedia outlets you are getting. We went with one of the upgraded packages (home theater, intercom, whole house audio) that gave us more MM outlets than we knew what to do with.

I placed a MM outlet in the garage. I have been VERY happy with that choice. I have a small TV in there, and I watch it all the time when I am working in the garage.

We also placed a MM outlet on the OUTSIDE of our house where our deck will be. We thought it would be nice to plug a phone/TV/laptop into it. I would caution you about this, though: although OpenBand will gladly take an extra $50 from you to install the MM outlet outdoors, the "weatherproof" box that they put the outlet in is not completely weather resistant. When we went through our pre-drywall walkthrough (after everything was wired, of course), they told us that because the outlet is not in a humidity controlled environment, the wires/etc. may eventually fail due to corrosion. I wish I had been told that when I was making my selections, I probably would not have placed an outlet outside.

Send me an e-mail if you have any other questions. My wife is quick to point out that we went a little crazy with the OpenBand options. I also asked A LOT of questions and did some non-traditional things, so I have a pretty good understanding of this stuff from a purchaser point of view.

Happy selecting!

 

Put alot in and do it yourself before they put up the sheetrock! I wish I had done that! Nothing's worse than trying to do that after the walls are finished.

 

I wouldn't advise anyone to put any MM (or other) outlets in themselves before the house is turned over to them. If there were any problems in the wiring after moving in, the builder could say it was the owner's fault (whether true or not). The final county inspection and closing could be held up because the outlets were not indicated on the house plans and the inspector actually noticed them.

I have at least 2 MM outlets in every room on opposite sides of the room so I don't have to string cable around the room. In my computer den, I needed both MM outlets when I had satellite Internet for the separate send/receive cables (1 outlet) and a TV cable (the other outlet).

 

How many MM outlets did you get? At $300+ a pop, I wasn't really interested in getting extras.

I agree with you about installing extra outlets yourself. I don't think VM would let you do that anyway. What you could do, however, is run speaker wire throughout the walls pre-drywall, tack the wires to the studs, and measure their location (so you can find them again after the drywall is in). I wouldn't think VM or the inspector would have a problem with that...

 

If I had it to do all over again, I would have opted for an extra phone line next to where we put the bed in the MB. We were just thinking "TV!!!" when we picked our spot.....

 

Why don't you get a phone with a cordless remote phone? There are some great ones out there, and they are pretty reasonably priced (<$100 for a 2.4 GHz base unit and one cordless remote without an answering machine). We have a couple of them throughout our house. You need to plug the base unit into a phone outlet (e.g., your office, the kitchen, etc.), and you can put the cordless remote wherever there is an electrical outlet. It really gives you a lot of flexibility. Another benefit is that you can use the remote phone and the base phone as an intercom.

We DID put an extra phone line where our bed is, but we don't even use it, because we use the remote instead...

 

I think I'll do just that! Thanks for the tip!

 

Sunny - I also recommend the cordless phone setup mentioned by Pats Fan. We got the AT&T model and they can also be used as walkie-talkies/pagers. I can pick up a phone upstairs and "page" my wife downstairs. This way I do not have to yell at the top of my lungs!

 

They were $150 per Verizon MM in the Ryan Homes. I could have gone without a couple of them, but I'd rather have them than want an extra 2 or 3 after the house was built.

 

Boy I wish the MM outlets were only $150. They are $360 EACH from VanMetre. I guess my delima is...

If you got the whole house audio, are you glad you did?
If you didn't did you wish you had?

I like the idea of an intercom, so I'll probably get that option.

Are you happy with the Home Theater option?

I'll get the NID-to-Attic Conduit as running extra cable in the future will be easy... Also, I agree with Gcyr about voiding the wiring warentee, which is why I'll choose most of my outlets on outside walls due to insulation, as running wires years from now on inside walls isn't too bad...

Thanks again everyone, this has been very helpful!!!!

-Scott

 

My builder wouldn't have cared. I could have had paid an outside contractor to do it cheaper if I wanted to. I guess you could have the plans updated with the county? It took 1 and a half years for my house to be started anyway due to the county stalling......

 

We have whole house audio. The speakers actually sound pretty good. We had speakers put in our kitchen, dining room, and one pair outside at deck level and the others outside at patio level (we're ina townhouse).

The only thing we should have done different is this:
Instead of putting the whole house audio plugs in the basement where our entertainment center is, we should have put the plugs in the middle floor. I mean, our entertainment center is self contained so it has it's own CD/Speakers etc. But if you want to listen to a CD upstairs w/whole house audio, you can't use that same system to watch TV or listen to different music in the basement. So figure on using a different CD player/amp whatever to hook up to the whole house speakers. We've recently moved the plugs upstairs to the middle floor and it only took one hole in the wall

Home theater option is good because your rear speakers won't have wires hanging all over the place as long as you take into account if they are going to hang on the wall or be on the floor (so you know where to put the plates). We don't use the sub plug but it's nice to have it. We had our own equipment so I'm not sure how their home theatre speakers are but the whole house ones are surprisingly nice so I assume they're very similar.

Hope that helps..oh and if you put a MM in a wall that connects two rooms together (like our 2nd & 3rd bedrooms share a wall), just put in one MM on that wall, it's pretty easy to add a 2nd one right behind it to the other room. That's what we did in our old place.

 

You can run your home theater system and your whole house audio systems from the same receiver, with different outputs, if you have an audio receiver with a multi-zone/dual-zone output. You will probably want to amplify the whole house audio signal, however, to increase the power to the whole house audio speakers.

 

I know a good rule of thumb that I learned is if you have a room that you are unsure as to where you want to put the MM outlet - put it near a corner. We have a couple of rooms where we put the MM outlet in the center of a wall, only to find that we ended up putting the TV in the corner and now have cables running along the base of the wall and plugged into the outlet.

If we had decided to put the TV in the center of the wall and the MM outlet was in the corner, we would have most likely had another piece of furniture in the corner anyway to hide most of the cables and outlet connection.

Putting it near a corner also provides more flexibility as to which direction you can run the cables.

Good luck!